Arts in Society ed. by Paul Barker (review)

164 Books Perhaps the key terms in Brown’s cognitive aesthetics are ‘metaphor’ and ‘point of view’. Sociology, like the arts, is metaphoric. One can trace the history of metaphor in sociology, as Brown does, by mentioning the profitable uses that have been made of organism, mechanism, language, drama and game. If the sociologist asks what society is like and conducts his investigations as if society were each of these root metaphors, then the perspective (or point of view) and the findings are likely to be very different. Though Brown doesnot discussmetaphor and point of view in the visual or plastic arts. except for the occasional reference, it should become clear to visual artists who read his book that metaphor liesat the heart of even the most austere nonfigurative work. Brown himself quotes Mondrian on this point: ‘Impressed by the vastness of nature, I was trying to express its expansion, rest and unity. At the same time, I was fully aware that the visible expansion of nature isat the same time its limitation: verticaland horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; these exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes “life”.’ Much of the best sociology, like much of the best art, is produced in an ironic mode. ‘Irony is a metaphor of opposites’, writes Brown, ‘a seeing of something from the viewpoint of its antithesis. Put slightly differently, to render something ironic is to take it from itsconventional context and place it in an opposite one. Through such a negation we become more aware of what that thing is.’ Irony becomes an instrument of archetypal innovation. In a conventional context of representational landscape, Mondrian introduced the structural geometry of articulated essence. Where conventional 19th-century moralists hoped to do away with crime, Durkheim plausibly argued that societies needed crime and its punishment in order to exist. The contemporary sociologist in the U.S.A., Erving Goffman, uses the devices of dramatic irony to suggest that as one goes about the business of everyday life, one is necessarily a kind of undiscovered criminal possessing a variety of guilty secrets. Wherever one looks in the sciences and in the arts, one will find, if one knows how to look, metaphors, points of view in conflict, ironies-multiple symbolic realities. For those readers who think that the arts do not provide ‘knowledge’of the sort supplied by the ‘hard’ sciencesand sociology, Brown’sbook will irritate and will be dismissed. For those others who take an opposed unitary view, his book will supply abundant plausible argument for an intuitively held position. Cultural Policy in Japan. Nobuya Shikaumi. Unesco, Paris, 1970. 55 pp. Reviewed by Thomas T. Ichinose” The Kabuki, the Bunraku and the Noh still stand as symbols of Japanese culture, just as the Bolshoi Ballet, the Russian operas and her classicalmusicare symbolicof Sovietculture today. Both are state-upheld, official cultures. As such, Japan is like a museum where old, and certainly unique things, are preserved ‘alive’,for visitors from abroad to admire and to look at forideas to take back home for their own uses. As for us (Japanese), it is desired even today, that we keep them ‘alive’but not that we put them to any real use ourselves. The culture, or what we call the Tradition, is gently but firmlyinstilledin us as the model and the ideal-so that no essentially original idea will ever become its match. The traditional arts therefore predominate and enthrall the soul and spirit of the people in a very big way. We are the only nation that boasts having ‘Human National Treasures’. This is also part of the State’s policy of preserving and glorifying the long dead past-shown as a paternal gesture mostly to old artists and craftsmen, well past their prime of life. Only quite recently folk arts were ‘rediscovered’ by the late Soetsu Yanagi and subsequently categorized as ‘traditional arts’. The next, and final step, lies in recognizing the value of original, individual art. But will this happen quite so easily and ‘naturally’, as in the case of the folk arts? Would not the elevation of originality and individuality to the level of ‘traditional’ subvert the very...